Reflections on #OETC15

For two days, I wandered the halls of the Columbus Convention Center, listening to other educators talk about how they are using technology in their worlds at the Ohio Ed Tech Conference. As I picked up tidbits about programs, apps, and practices in classrooms and schools across Ohio, I heard one resounding theme emitting from the speakers.

Students can demonstrate learning in so many ways! Give them a chance! 

I made that cry in my Genius Hour presentation, but I was surprised how often I heard it from other speakers.

I sat in on an OETCx panel discussion, where the main topic of conversation was how to change school culture. Let me tell you...it's hard.  Our default mode is to teach the way we were taught. With increasing emphasis on Common Core standards and high-stakes standardized testing, it's continually easier to drift to the lecture, lecture, lecture model.  School culture may be hard to change, but it's necessary to change it.

Teachers at Bay Village Schools decided to teach Scratch to their fourth graders, collaborating with a local university.Those students went crazy using Scratch as a learning tool. And it's more (much more!) than making a cute cat move across as screen.  Students are using code to teach about math, prepositions, and lots more.  I got to thinking that what we have here are students who are learning -- really learning -- the required standards in core classes but using a non-traditional way to demonstrate their learning. That learning is shared on Scratch and their local Scratch site, so they are creating for a larger audience than just the teacher. Awesome! (You can see their presentation here.)

Kent Schools has created a girl coders club that meets one evening a week. These eight young ladies are learning some key skills that can directly lead them to STEM jobs, and we all know about the huge gender gap in all things STEM.

My friend Jon talked about writing iBooks with his students. He recognized that his students hated to write, but when presented with the idea of publishing books online, they stepped up their writing, editing, and collaboration skills! Now 43 books, 30,000 downloads, and one global project later Jon has found a way to ignite a love of learning and writing while demonstrating that to a very large audience. When he first got into the iBook game, his principal asked him if he could come up with some standards he was hitting. Jon highlighted 75 standards they covered writing one book in two weeks. Score! (Jon's presentation can be found here.) (Commercial Break: Jon is looking for teachers to join him in #twima2. Interested? Click the link.)

The theme ran through keynotes and special sessions. I don't have time to hit all the points, but Yong Zhao said it well that schools should be a personalized educational ecosystem.  It got to the point that I sent out this tweet.

Is it just me, or does this keynote sound like a commercial for #GeniusHour? #oetc15
— Craig Dunlap (@Cncdky) February 12, 2015

Vicki Davis packed her session with tons of great quotes, but two ideas stuck out to me.  Students should create things that are meaningful TO THEM. If a student writes for just you, it is a waste of their time and your time. The audience should be so much bigger.

I mentioned in my Genius Hour session that the average preschooler asks about 100 questions a day, and the average middle schooler has stopped asking questions? (source) Why is that? We, the educational system, have told them that sitting quietly, listening to our questions and answers, and giving that information back on a test are all more important than exploration, mentoring, and global audience.

By the end of OETC, I felt like we were all saying the same thing but coming at it from different angles - coding, books, geniuses, and other examples I didn't get to. I felt like we were a group of 3000 people all saying the same thing.

Do you feel like we're all saying the same thing in different ways? #oetc15
— Craig Dunlap (@Cncdky) February 12, 2015

1. Students can learn and demonstrate learning in non-traditional ways. The don't all have to be techie though.
2. Students need to take ownership of their learning. Student choice helps bring that to the table.
3. Their audience should be much more broad than the teacher. The World Is My Audience.

Now... How do we get our friends and colleagues on this train with us? 

Vicki Davis had an interesting saying. "Innovate like a turtle." While I would love to see my entire school using these great teaching tools and others NOW, I realized that it's more important to look to the slow innovations around me.  I have a colleague who has said, "My blackboard doesn't break on me." In other words, she had no intent of diving into ed tech because what she has always done is working well for her.  I'm happy to say that for Grandparents' Day she had her students create and show Educreations videos.  Next week her class will participate in our first Mystery Skype session.  Baby steps. Innovation like a turtle.

I love OETC.  I love seeing the great new tools that are out there. I love meeting with like-minded educators and coming home with new contacts. I also love to see it applied in my school, and I'm hoping I can bring some of this edtech love to my colleagues and see more innovation around me.

#HourOfCode 2014

Unless you are hiding under a rock and avoiding the edtech world, you probably know that this is Hour of Code week all over the world. I've been looking forward to this week since we completed Coding Week last year.  My last few classes this week will be covered by a sub while I'm in Columbus for a conference. I thought now would be a great time to reflect on the week.

This has been a hard post for me to write, because I'm not sure I'll add much to the Hour of Code conversation. My guess is that I'm a part of the vast majority of teachers who directed students to code.org/learn to do the various activities. Just before I decided to scrap the post completely, I decided to just highlight some of the better moments rather than summarize every grade level like I did last year.

I really like LightBot. In this game, you need to send a little robot around a maze of blocks, moving forward, turning left or right, and jumping till he hits a blue square. Then he lights it up. The concept is easy but each level gets a bit harder. One of my 5th grade girls, asked for help on a particular stage. I gave her a hint or two then moved on. A few minutes later I sauntered by. Seeing she was on the same stage, I made a comment. "Oh, it looks like you're figuring it out." Her response? "I already solved it. I'm just trying to do it a different way." #win!

Literally minutes before my kindergarten class came to the room, I had second thoughts about directing them to Daisy the Dinosaur. I knew some of the kids could handle Daisy, but most of them don't have the reading skills yet.  I decided to download The Foos to the iPads and see if it would be good. Yes, I realize last second lesson plan switches are not necessarily good ideas. Yes, I realize kindergartners need more individual attention I was able to give them as I frantically downloaded an app to each iPad in the room, but here is the beauty of my story. Just as I directed the kids to The Foos I realized some iPads didn't have the app completely downloaded. As I was working on those, I heard students excitedly interacting with the game. "You figured it out yourself?" "Yes! It's fun!" Needless to say I introduced it to my kindergarten daughter that same night. #thankyoufoos

For better or for worse, I tend to give students few directions when starting a new app. I want them to figure it out themselves and spread the joy to others. That's why I was excited to overhear a second grader exclaim, "I love Scratch Jr! It's a lot like Educreations!" Now, I have to say I'm not exactly sure how the two apps are similar, but that's not the point. I now have a student comparing and contrasting apps, and will no doubt be messing with Scratch Jr in the future.  #score!

I'm planning on dipping into coding again next week.  With visions of sugar plum fairies dancing in their heads, along with parties, play practice, and the like, I decided Coding Week, Part Two would be a glorious way to finish out December. I'm looking forward to seeing what great stories come from a second week of coding fun.

Coding Week

This past spring, I watched the video below and was inspired to teach coding to all my computer students.

There is only one little problem.  I don't know how to code.  So, I used Code Academy to teach myself coding in my free time.  That worked for a while, and I tried it out on my middle school class.  What we learned using Code Academy is that there are many glitches that caused us more stress than we needed.  I'm sure that Code Academy is a great way to learn coding, but I quickly ditched it as a teaching tool in middle school.

What I have found that I like is a host of apps that teach pre-coding skills, especially for elementary and middle school grades. I call these skills pre-coding because we're teaching logic, not language.  Students need to plot and plan a course of action BEFORE they actually begin any movement. The levels start easy but get increasingly difficult as the game goes on.

I recently learned of the Hour of Code Week coming up December 9-15 and got really excited.  In fact, I got so excited that I started early.  I dubbed this week (November 18-22) Coding Week in all my elementary computer classes*.

My kindergartners started out the fun using Kodable, and they loved it! In Kodable, students send a cute little furry creature through a maze, collecting coins as it goes. Students drag directional arrows and color blocks into a specific order before you send the little critter on his merry way.

Honestly, I wondered if I bit off more than I could chew on this. But, I jumped in with both feet and hoped for the best. I showed them an example so they would know the goal before they touched an iPad. It turned out my fears were for naught, because they dove in like the digital natives they are.  I loved how they figured it out, asked good questions, and celebrated victories -- collaboratively.  I liked Kodable so much, that I'm now using it with my daughter in preschool.  (We're taking it slowly, but I think she's getting the hang of the first few levels.)

My first and second graders got their start in Kodable, but they were ready for something else -- something a bit more challenging.  So, we brought in Daisy the Dinosaur with them. The coder's job in Daisy is a bit more complicated. One prerequisite is the ability to read.  On each level, you have to read the goal, then drag and drop the commands for Daisy into the "Program" square.  Daisy can move in two directions, jump, grow, shrink, spin, and do other fun things.  After completing the Challenge Mode, students go on to the free play section where they can really have fun with Daisy.


As students play around with Daisy, they learn what makes Daisy do what they want her to do and what makes her do things they never intended. They learn to use the "Repeat 5" and "When" commands which get into more complex programs.

Daisy was a good introduction to drag and drop coding for my third and fourth grade students, but I quickly moved them on to Hopscotch. (Daisy the Dinosaur was created by the Hopscotch people, for the younger set.) In Hopscotch, the coder picks a character (or more -- as my students discovered) and send them about a three-dimensional board.  Again, the commands are programmed before you see what the character will do.  There are many more commands and they are more complex.  I challenged students to make shapes, but after using the app myself a number of times, I got tired of triangles and showed them how to alter the angle just slightly to make super-cool figures (see below).

My fifth and sixth graders started with Hopscotch, but after about 15 minutes, I moved them on to Cargo Bot, a game in which the coder is challenged to program a machine to move boxes into a pre-determined order.  This is highly addicting and requires a lot of trial and error.  In fact, I could tell that I was bending their minds a bit more than they wanted them bent.

(Note: This solution does not work. I wish it did.)

Blockly is one program I wanted to do with the students, but never got around to using. This is not an iPad app, but is a part of the Google family.  In this game, you pre-program the guy from Google Maps around mazes and hope he doesn't get lost.

Cargo Bot was my introduction to this genre of iPad app.  I found it in the spring and loved it!  I spent many an hour playing it -- all in the name of research, of course -- and found it quite challenging.  However, the teacher in me must confess that I enjoy Hopscotch better because it gives students the chance to explore, plan, and make new things.  That's not to say that Cargo Bot (or any of these apps, for that matter) don't teach higher level thinking skills.

One thing is for sure, I've tapped into a thinking level that these students aren't used to.  For the most part, they enjoyed these coding apps, but they also couldn't wait to get on to something else.  (For instance, Sumdog's Thanksgiving competition is going on right now, and they couldn't wait to get a turkey costume for their avatars.) However, I'm excited to add these apps to my repertoire of apps students can peruse in their free time.  

I apologize for the poor quality of these pics below.  They were either taken with my dying iPad camera or my not-so-smart phone.  However, I thought it would be fun to include pictures of actual students playing these apps.